Summer Session

This blog will be to introduce the topics for the rest of summer. For those of you readers using this for independent study, this clarification will be useful if you have to justify a curriculum.

It is Fourth of July, I holiday I have no interest in. It is loud and sends the wrong message. It reminds me of the new American "hero complex" that pervades everyday life and is the bane of my existence.

For the next two months I will attempt to answer two very important questions - not unrelated. 1) Why is philosophy important? and 2) What is realism? The latter question in some sense justifies the former. If I can prove realism to be relevant, and because it is a part of philosophy, then perhaps we can see why philosophy is important.

1) Why is philosophy important? The conventional wisdom is that it is antiquated at best and is a bunch of old, white males talking about nothing. It has (they say) nothing to do with real life.

2) Realism, Reid's version contained with critical commonsense, is an attempt at providing an alternative to the idealism, a system dominant since the mid 18th Century. Idealism means that we essentially make reality with our mind. The tree doesn't really fall in the woods. All interpretation is based on individual perception and different. There is no truth. These are all retorts inherent in idealism and opposed to realism. Realism is the belief that things exist outside your mind.

It is a painful and ironic state that we live in - a time when realism is assumed by all and yet denied by the same. Reid had this experience circa 1760. Lazy white males sat in comfy chairs and assumed themselves "spinning" the greatest ideas we know out of their own minds. If Hume walked outside he would assume all the truth of science and realism, but alone in his chair he was skeptical of all. It is indeed ironic.

Realism is the belief that the mind encounters objects, not the other way around. Objects do not need any sort of mind to maintain existence or duration. If nobody is in the woods to perceive it, the tree still falls, the noise is still the same though it only falls on the ears of deer.

For those of you with questions at the outset, please feel free to email in here. I thank all of you who over the past couple months have sent in real reactions, interpretations, questions, etc about critical commonsense.

Writers contained in our discussion of realism including Reid, Hume, Kant and Mill. Feel free to make other suggestions.